Wednesday, November 6, 2013

As the days grow shorter....

my thoughts turn to knitting! Needlework is my first love, but I do enjoy to mix things up a bit with some knitting and crocheting. As with my needlework stash, my yarn stash has grown to monumental proportions with all the wonderful yarns that are out there. I love the hand-dyed yarns with my favorite being those from Lorna's Laces . The yarns are wonderfully soft and interestingly enough, many of the colors are named for neighborhoods in Chicago. My eldest daughter lives in downtownish Chicago and seeing those color names makes me think of her. :-)

My current on-the-needle project is a scarf I'm knitting for myself using Lorna's Laces shepherd sport (100% superwash merino) yarn in color Baltic Sea (not named for an area of Chicago!).

The scarf pattern is from a pattern book of my mom's, copyrighted in the 1940's, I think. It's a very basic scarf knit on size 3 needles using a sport weight yarn. It does not knit up quickly, IMO! I like my scarves long so I can wrap them around my face once and tie the ends together (it can get cold in Iowa in the winter and when the wind blows I like to totally cover up my face except for my eyes...), so I'm planning on making this scarf 6 ft long. Mom was very flattering when she told me I needed to make the scarf that long since I'm so "big" and she doesn't mean tall..... Thanks, Mom!!

I'm about 14" into the scarf at this point but haven't worked on it for awhile. When I fly to Las Vegas this weekend I'll be knitting the scarf while in the air and during the 2 hour layover in Houston. The colors are a bit washed out in this picture - it's more true to life in the top picture.

In addition to the standard line of colors for the Lorna's Laces yarn, they do custom colors for shops if requested. Jimmy Bean's Wool in Reno has a color of the month which I often find hard to resist!